General DeWitt initially
favored a “voluntary” removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. It was only voluntary in the sense that
they would get to choose where to relocate outside the restricted area, however. There was nothing voluntary
about leaving.

Unfortunately for General
DeWitt’s plans, many Japanese Americans had no where to go, and those
who did try to leave often had to turn back after being denied service at gas
stations and threatened with violence in supposedly unrestricted states. So the
policy changed to one of forced removal into hastily assembled incarceration
camps.

While the permanent camps
were being constructed, General DeWitt sent most of the West Cost Japanese
Americans to temporary camps.* These assembly centers, as they were called,
were built primarily at race tracks and fair grounds, where there was enough
land to squeeze in thousands of men, women, and children. They contained three
basic types of housing.

·Horse stables, shown in the picture, were
converted into family housing, often with six people crowding into a stall with
two “rooms” separated by Dutch doors. (The back room was for the horse and the
front room for the fodder.) Linoleum was laid directly over the manure-covered
floors, and the rooms smelled of urine. The walls had been whitewashed so
hastily that the painters hadn’t even swept off the cobwebs or the insects,
which were now part of the interior decoration.

·Cow barns with concrete floors were divided into
miniature units using flimsy wooden partitions that didn’t reach all the way
to the ceiling.

·Tar-papered barracks designed for soldiers were
constructed with green lumber that quickly shrunk, leaving gaps in the floorboards
with grass and dandelions growing through them.

All three types of housing
were short on privacy. Males and females had to share sleeping rooms, and the
thin walls (most of which didn’t reach to the ceiling) guaranteed that your
neighbors knew your business and that the crying baby four units away would
keep you up at night.

And the furnishings? An
army cot and straw ticking for each member of the family. Period. As time
passed, people managed to make their quarters livable, but that was due solely
to their own resourcefulness.

The inmates ate their
meals at picnic tables in a huge mess hall. Badly cooked oatmeal was standard
breakfast fare, and dinner might consist of two canned sausages, a boiled
potato, and a piece of bread without butter. They didn’t starve, but they didn’t
eat their fill, either.

The bathroom situation
was even worse. Dozens or perhaps hundreds of people shared a common latrine
with no doors on the stalls. In some locations, it was just a row of seats with
no partitions between them. The showers were also communal. And there were no
bathtubs for the Issei, who were unused to showers.

What if there was a
storm? If they wanted to eat, they went out in the rain. If they needed to use
the bathroom, they went out in the rain. Or mothers took empty coffee cans from
the mess hall garbage and used them as chamber pots for their young children,
requiring them to empty and rinse the cans during the day. Those were their
choices.

I don’t know about you,
but I wouldn’t want to live like that.

__________

* Some Japanese
Americans were sent directly to Manzanar, which was the first permanent camp to
be “completed.” Even that word is a misnomer, however, as construction
continued long after the inhabitants arrived. The next post will cover these
permanent camps.

__________

The photograph at the top
of this post shows a row of converted horse stalls at Tanforan Assembly Center
in San Bruno, California. It was taken by Dorothea Lange on June 16, 1942 as
part of her official duties as an employee of the United States government.
Because it is a government document, the photo is in the public domain.